


Jackson. Summer.

by Clementine19



Series: _Joel [2]
Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:02:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26135434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clementine19/pseuds/Clementine19
Summary: A good, old-fashioned fixit 5 & 1 where a bunch of perspectives in Jackson witness Joel being happy and falling in love with someone after 2038. It's shamelessly my OC, Molly, the same eventual one as loosely alluded to in Austin. Before.I'm linking them as a series here but there will also be a fuller piece of people being happy in Jackson, and they're not meant to be sequential. This is more a series of vignettes, Austin. Before. more a retrospective of Joel before Molly.
Relationships: Joel (The Last of Us)/Original Female Character(s)
Series: _Joel [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1866379
Kudos: 28





	1. Jesse

“Mr. Williams! Mr. Williams, please come collect your daughter! She! Is! DRUNK!” Jesse bellows outside of Joel’s front porch. Ellie’s in a headlock, bitching at her captor miserably, raining weak little tipsy blows on him from below.

“He’s gonna kill you in the morning. Patrol? Time for a ‘mistake,’” Ellie threatens. 

“No way. He’ll thank me for bringing his dumb gay kid home before she could make a bigger mess,” Jesse retorts. He’s also swaying a little. 

“You’re not the armit-armpit—armbiter—ARBITER of my mistakes, asshole,” Ellie protests, still caught. 

Jesse wheels them around to Joel’s back door, leading into the kitchen, rustling every bit of brush and trees they pass.

“Oh fuck!” he breathes, slamming what everyone on patrol knew as his ‘mom hand’ into Ellie’s diaphragm and knocking her down into a woozy crouch. 

Luckily, the contents of the kitchen were entirely too focused on each other to hear the teenage commotion outside. Joel had Molly up on the counter, one of his shirts hiked around her waist and his hands under it. He honestly may not have gotten all his holsters off from patrol before this started. Jesse tried to cover a snicker below the screen door, biting his thumb to avoid noise.

“What? What?!” Ellie hissed, eyes wide.

“Your old man is getting spectacularly laid, that’s what,” Jesse whispers back, hands out in front of him like he’s calming an animal.

“No fuckin’ way,” Ellie replies, mouth remaining open after she says it. 

An unmistakable noise comes from the screen door, and Jesse freezes, eyes wide but smirk not fading as he stills.

“Wanna see?” he mouths at Ellie, jerking his head towards the house. He can clearly see Molly has gotten Joel out of his shirt and has her mouth on his neck, Joel's fingers indenting her ass forcefully. A hazy _nice_ passes through his mind. She's charming, super hot for however old she was, and Jesse's an early-twenties automaton. Can't help himself.

“Gross!” she mouths back. She can't resist a clicker-like involuntary jerk of disgust, inching down over the porch, avoiding the step she knows squeaks. She’d snuck in enough. 

Ellie disappears off the back porch and back into the Jackson night before Jesse can react. He follows her path, not easing up on the creaky stair, and hears wind rushing past his ears and the door slamming open as he retreats at full speed, blowing past Ellie once they’re on the street. 

—

The next morning, Jesse is sheepish and unusually quiet as he mounts up beside Joel. Jesse watches Joel a little warily when they both check their ammunition. Maybe the sound of metal actuating is just louder with a hangover. 

“Good night, kiddo?” Joel asks, politely quiet. 

“Uh, yeah, you?” Jesse immediately fumbles.

Joel just smirks at him. 

“No chance you tried to deposit my dumb, gay kid at my home instead of her shed last night?” 

Jesse flushes. 

“Sir, I—” Jesse starts, genuinely respectful of Ellie’s old man, and a little abashed, remembering that he'd called him "Mr. Williams" last night.

“Fuck off with the sir, kiddo. First, don’t ever sneak up on someone still armed. Second, if you crouched like that a clicker’d damn near mount up with his friends to come nibble on you from miles away. You have to practice, because injured moves like drunk does, and that was a poor show. Third, you mention the slightest thing to Molly, and I’ll hang you from the patrol tower.” 

“Yep, s—Joel,” Jesse assents, letting his horse drop a little behind. 

“Fourth, what’d Ellie do now?” Joel drops back to keep pace.

Jesse lights up, ready to sing. 

“Well, she’s certainly been on a streak. She fought Dan, who’s in love with her, who this new girl Cat is maybe falling for, dunno, and who I think I watched reevaluate her whole, y'know, whole fuckin' shit after seeing Ellie fight ‘im,” Jesse pours, gesturing as if to elucidate what he meant but mostly pissing his horse off by yanking the reins. 

“What’d he say?”

“I think he was trying to flirt, honestly. Said she’s too butch for a pretty girl,” Jesse shrugs.

“Did you get her knife in time?” Joel asks, eyes on the path ahead.

Jesse spins the little stiletto out from his pocket, holding it up proudly like a kid showing off their artwork.

"Nicely done," Joel grants him grudgingly, grateful that Ellie hadn't carved anyone's larynx out. Jesse doesn't miss the slight smile Joel's trying to clamp down on, nor the weirdly good humor Joel exudes as he focuses on surviving his icepick headache between the day's sparse gunshots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somewhere across Jackson, Ellie has spent the time since she noticed her pocketknife was gone either: 1) honing the largest knife she can find for when Jesse gets back or 2) meticulously detaching his desk legs from his desk and reattaching them to his chair, and the reverse.


	2. Seth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seth's an idiot. 
> 
>   
> [Joel's canonically this dad](https://twitter.com/JuliaBaritz/status/1288146205437042688)

“Miller!” Seth hisses out below his breath, his wife’s warning call receding as he tramples through the mud towards Joel’s house. He’s a fuckin’ nuisance, and Tommy’s soft on him. His kid’s worse.

Seth’s grievance of the day is all about setting a good example for the kids and how Joel’s support of Ellie might give people the wrong idea about him, too.

“Enabling that isn’t helping her, you know,” Seth inserted his unsolicited opinion as the two men picked out produce from the stalls in closer proximity then they should ever be.

Joel blinks at him, a summation of surprise at Seth’s presence and gall.

“Not helping _any_ of the kids. We should be giving a better example,” Seth continues.

Joel’s face darkens as he thrusts the last potato he’d selected into his pack.

“The _kids,_ Seth, spend more time out on patrol keeping this place safe than you do picking at the moral center of Jackson County every day,” Joel had snarled back at him, low. “Think they can make their own damn choices ‘bout who to survive with since they’re actually _doin’_ the goddamn work’,” Joel felt Ellie tense behind him. She’d made him self-conscious of dropping his gs, mostly because it only ever indicated his readiness to get into a fistfight. And today, there wasn’t a properly enunciated suffix in sight.

Maria had practically slid onto home base between them in her effort to become a buffer.

“Seth, home,” Maria instructed wearily. “Joel, you too.” They both looked ready to physically hiss at each other, on all fours and snarling. Maria rolls her eyes as she retreats from the scene back to Tommy, who has nearly indented dimples onto his face with the effort to not laugh, gnawing his inner cheeks with a tight jaw. Poor fucking Seth.

So, minutes later, Seth trudges up to Joel’s porch, hand poised to continue their exchange when he hears a sound he didn’t expect.

“Joel—” a woman’s voice moans.

“Hush, woman, it’s the middle of the goddamn day,” he laughs back.

" _Woman?_ " she questions him emphatically. The sounds of tableware falling to the floor and weight colliding with something solid has Seth freezing in a stiff stance, terrified to be heard or seen. Seth fumes internally, angry at this man for making it impossible to have a confrontation with him when he wasn't done.

_The_ audacity _on this fuckin’ guy to just not give a shit. To just go about his day. It’s not right. How could that woman support a man allowing his kid to carry on that way?_

“Fuck!” the voice he can clearly discern as Molly’s exclaims lightly, in unison with an “Oh, shit,” from Joel, immediately followed by a crash and shatter. There’s laughter, more seconds of quiet, and another pointed slam as someone is dropped on something closer to the door.

Seth fast-walks home with his hands thrust in his pocket. _Unbelievable_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yo, fuck Seth.


	3. Tommy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I want to believe Tommy and Joel wouldn't have far to go to get to interacting like this again canonically, so in this universe, they've mutually thawed, even if they're both beyond traumatized.

“Joel, the fuck got your neck?” Tommy grumbles, breaking an agonizing near-three-hour silence on patrol.

“Mmm?” Joel replies dumbly, leaning into his rifle’s stock and obliterating a clicker in the valley below. He feels a flush of heat roll through him with the recollection of what exactly he’d done to earn the scratches he thought were obscured below his collar. Good thing his brother could’t see the rest of his back or he’d hear about it at top volume for weeks. 

Tommy reaches out and prods at the light wounds, comprehension hitting him as Joel gives the type of swat only brothers used to casually smacking the shit out of each other can pull off. He doesn’t look as he does it, but there’s a lightness to some of their boyhood interactions returning as they string together more and more routine days in Jackson.

“Holy fuck, finally,” Tommy sighs and squeezes his trigger twice in quick succession, adding a runner to the pile of infected bodies near the radio antennae they’d steadily built as the sun had come up.

“Finally fuckin’ what, Tommy?” Joel snaps.

“Nevermind, you’re still pissy as hell,” Tommy shrugs, pulling the trigger twice in quick succession and missing when Joel taps the bottom of the barrel, sending his shots skyward.

Tommy gives him an indignant look at the waste, shaking his head and bending down to collect the spent shells.

“You’re refillin’ these,” he grunts, tucking them into Joel’s jacket pocket.

“I’m not pissy,” Joel says quietly with his eye on his scope.

“Either a raccoon did that,” Tommy pauses thoughtfully, “Or someone who ain’t a raccoon did,” he finishes his comparison weakly.

Joel lowers his rifle and squints at his brother.

“What do you want, Tommy?”

Tommy tries to take a breath and pause.

“Who?” he asks after a rushed count to five.

“Who you think?” Joel chuckles, looking down and scuffing the ground with the toe of his boot.

“Holy shit, you _really_ fucking like her,” Tommy comments.

“How would you know? Way Maria tells it she nearly had to propose before you realized how she was lookin’ at you,” he defends, crossing his arms after propping his gun up on a tree, hazel eyes animated.

“Listen, _I’m_ dumb, but I haven’t seen you act like that,” he points and nods once at Joel’s feet,“…about a girl since…shit, I don’t even remember who,” Tommy adds, hesitant to bring anything before up.

“Liz,” Joel says softly. He started in Jackson snapping left and right, as if he’d been summoned into existence fully this version of Joel, with his years washed of experiences just an instant before stepping over the threshold to this new community. As he did the best impression of settling in that someone so exhausted could, Ellie and Tommy had started to unwind his bitter, choked silence, one comment over dinner or late night beers at a time.

Tommy gives him a warm smile. Liz was twenty-five years and an apocalypse away, but he’d genuinely liked her and remembered how effervescently joyful his normally taciturn brother became with her. They didn’t give voice to it, but they both hoped she was okay, somewhere.

“Which one of you finally went for it?” Tommy pokes.

“Please tell me you don’t have a bet riding on this with Ellie,” Joel pinches the bridge of his nose and shrugged his jacket off, the early fall weather starting to warm into a dim glow around the valley as the day heated up.

“I do not have a bet riding on this with Ellie,” Tommy replies too accurately.

Joel spins and points at him.

“You said that too damn fast, who’s it with?”

Tommy looks sheepish but his smile is still touching his eyes.

“Maria,” he admits. She’d scoped Molly and Joel shyly circling each other weeks ago. It was subtle, but the irregularity of Joel choosing his words carefully for once and minding his manners was a dead giveaway.

“And I am not telling you the bet, out of both respect and fear of my exceptionally hot wife, thank you,” he adds, puffing his chest a little. 

Joel makes a face, doing reflexive mental math and scowling.

“She started it,” he confesses, hands on his head, elbows splayed, looking down at the thinned herd of infected.

“Maria put you on patrol together, so, I mean,” Tommy shoulders his rifle again and takes out another stray infected.

“Wasn’t on patrol,” Joel scandalizes him.

Tommy makes a huffing noise.

“Good luck, man,” he says in the same older-brother tone Joel uses with him.

“She came over the first night she was moved in and staying in town. Believe _your_ _wife_ had her ‘drop off’ some sweet tea,” Joel accuses.

“Maria makes her own choices,” Tommy says like he’s defending something far more serious. He’s perpetually aware that he’s one of those choices.

“Then she came over with coffee. And then she came over for drinks more often, and when I went to return a hat she’d left before patrol one morning, she kissed me,” he continues.

“Molly,” Tommy says, pumping his fist close to his chest.

“Wait a goddamn minute—is that why you were late for the training patrol last week?” he adds.

“Ellie can handle it just fine without me,” Joel says, a rare display not for his confidence in Ellie and her competence but for his ability to give her room.

“Bullshit, well, I mean, you’re right, but it was over an hour,” Tommy diagnoses.

Joel reloads his rifle slowly and smoothly, putting careful thought into his thumb on each shell.

“Wow,” Tommy understands with an impressed pout. “Well,” he clears his throat. He was always the one bothering women when they were out (which, despite Joel’s constant ribbing, was only _infrequently_ interpreted as a genuine bother and more often a charming kid) and watching his brother hang back, unsure of himself after Sarah’s mom and too busy with Sarah to put much thought into it. He’s just contented that Joel seems happy enough to let someone be close.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Liz will be a chapter over here soon: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25729858/chapters/62478007
> 
> Molly & Joel's story still to be posted :)


	4. Ellie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joel and Molly are being good this time! They're just doing the nesting-bird thing, and Ellie is appropriately averse to seeing him be affectionate with his partner. 
> 
> AU where either father and/or daughter can confront one single emotion without repressing it until it suffocates, have a real conversation. When they meet Abby, Tommy shuts up, doesn't invite her for dinner, and this group of fractured, damaged people keep building a reality and a world for each other in Jackson. (No Abs hate, I'll get to her in another AU.) 
> 
> Ellie and Dina have been sleeping together for a few months in the house she shared with her sister, but half of Ellie’s stuff is in Joel’s shed. Molly is either patient or as averse to emotional Big Talks as Joel and Ellie are, in her own way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not beta'd, we die like men etc.

Ellie squints down into the glinting snow, scuffing the top of her boots with the opposite toes of each. She bounces one off of the bottom step of his porch.

****\--

“Go fucking talk to him. Be the adult here,” Dina emphasized, hand against Ellie’s chest as she pushed her out on Dina's porch minutes before.

“Dina, it’s ten in the morning, what if I wake him up? He’s fucking horrible first thing,” Ellie moaned.

Dina folded her arms, the same stormy look of displeasure crossing her face as the night before, when she snapped at Ellie that she hadn’t been around him enough in the last few years to know if that’s still true. Ellie processed the look on her face in the dim light of their bedroom, hearing _I don’t think he made a mistake. Do you?_ Dina’s brows had knit together, asking more, asking for Ellie to take this, them, seriously, exhausted from hearing the truth and fighting about how long it had taken Ellie to tell it since dinner, hours before.

Ellie raised her hands, Joel’s shorter and narrower double, turning with her eyebrows raised to trample towards Joel's house. 

\--

Ellie shrugs, looking up at his door. She can see firelight bouncing off the living room windowpanes, a good sign that he was awake, probably reading.

“Joel?” she calls, knocking still not a habit.

On the couch, Joel looks over his shoulder, poking out from the blankets enough to register what he’d heard. Molly is tucked against his chest, the whole comforter from upstairs tucked around them both while they’d waited for the fire Joel made efficiently to warm the room so they could make breakfast. He has both arms tucked comfortably around her waist, perfectly content. 

“Ellie?” he calls back.

“Yeah,” she answers huffily, throwing her arms out in exasperation as she hears no motion from inside.

“S’open,” he yells again, an arm over the back of the couch. Molly’s head is still cradled in his opposite hand. Like most times he’d made a decision he knew was a selfish, he watched with a sense of inevitability as Ellie closed the door behind her, face red with the cold, noticing their entangled forms and casting her eyes down the hall. 

Molly lifts a hand to wave, pecking Joel’s cheekbone and pressing off of him, making him shiver with the cold air left in her wake.

“I’ll get some coffee started,” she says, retreating around the corner to the kitchen, stopping to step into Joel’s boots. He takes the honest notice of a person who’s known too much supply scarcity, reflex melting as she reappears for a second before disappearing, already tucked into the coat he leaves in the kitchen.

“Mornin’,” Joel makes room on the couch, still cocooned in his comforter. Ellie’d never known him to be particularly attached to luxuries, picturing him rising off of the ground or battered floors in the morning when they’d been grateful for a clicker-free shelter. A moment of horror that he may not be dressed passes as she remembers how badly he fidgets when he’s apprehensive, sure his hands were just anchored to the fabric.

He watches her slide off her backpack and lean back, looking up at the ceiling.

“How’re—” he starts, colliding with her “Joel—”.

Joel presses his lips together and gestures to Ellie to go ahead. Her attempts at forgiveness were going in fits and starts, and she'd spent the fall stretching a gap between them.

“I need to talk to you. We need to talk,” she says, rolling her head to the side on the back of the couch to look at him, hands clasped over her waist, legs outstretched.

“Should I get my coat?” he asks quietly.

“I’ll take the coffee first,” Ellie cracks a smile at him, trying to make it feel normal and knowing it just looks hollow. She reaches into her jacket, fingers finding a flask of whisky she’d had low success filling without splashing this morning.

Joel nods, rising and folding the comforter, tossing it over the back of the couch. He retreats to the kitchen with the kind of haste that aims to keep the cold off.

“—need those,” Ellie hears him intone, sounds of fabric swishing and boots being exchanged. There’s a long moment of silence and he returns, shrugging on his coat, unlaced boots thudding against the floor. He’s holding two coffees and jerks his head to where he came from.

“Out back?” he asks, and Ellie follows him silently, Molly passing them and disappearing up the stairs with a gentle smile at Ellie.

They settle on the porch chairs that face the backyard, Ellie’s shed in one corner. There’s the type of soft crystalline early-winter snow on its small roof that always makes her feel a little cheerful. She tries to remember not to get fooled by that first powdery glimpse every year, usually around February in Jackson, but the safe way the mountains encircle their home makes it impossible.

Joel bumps her hand with her coffee mug, startling her before she accepts it. 

Ellie reaches into her jacket, extracting the whiskey.

“It is eleven A.M., Ellie,” he half-objects, deliberately enunciating words he'd usually contract. Molly had _just_ suggested they spend the day very stoned on Eugene’s weed in bed, and he’d agreed. 

Ellie pauses above his mug, giving him a long look.

He rolls his eyes and bumps the rim with his mug’s lip. Ellie pours.

They both drink silently, watching the sun creep further up the yard for a few minutes.

“Okay, look,” Ellie leans forward, turning her half-empty mug carefully in gloved hands.

To Joel’s credit, he only looks mildly alarmed.

“I’m so fucking angry at you. You need to know that, still,” Ellie starts. Joel opens his mouth and she flings up a finger.

“No. I’m mad, and I’m probably not right. I’m not right enough to never talk to you,” she admits.

"And I do forgive you," Ellie adds softly, thinking she'd save any gratitude for getting to meet Dina and live a contextually normal life in Jackson for later. That was hard enough and she felt winded from it. 

“Does she know?” Pointing vaguely upstairs, Ellie squints at him.

“Yes,” he admits quietly, watching her cautiously. “Tommy, too.”

Ellie snorts.

“Tommy ratted you out like, instantly. Instantly. Maria knows, of course,” Ellie fills him in.

Joel looks down, not sure if he should feel as ashamed as he does, sipping at the coffee. It _was_ helping.

“They would never say a word, not to a soul,” Joel starts.

“I know that, Joel. Dina knows, of course. I mean, she knows what I know. So, you’re going to tell me exactly what happened. And we are going to finish these, and then you’re going to start telling me more about Molly and if I need to threaten her or whatever your kid’s supposed to do,” she leans back crossing her arms.

Joel sighs, scanning Ellie’s face like she’d tell him where to start. Her serious face reminds him of Tommy’s general obstinance, the bitter hope they both shimmered with; the thing he’d tried to find in his own eyes again with a real mirror in his house in Jackson. He finishes his mug and leans forward, elbows on his knees. It's hard enough to remember himself the day he'd taken Ellie from Salt Lake, much less look at her while he haltingly recounts it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They'll get there. Who knows if hearing what he had to do to get her out will change it—you either flamethrowered that whole surgical floor or tortured some terrified people in scrubs slowly, so you do you. 
> 
> My main point here is Jackson is good for them both. They can have totally normal weirdness, like Joel deciding in a split second that he's serious enough about Molly for Ellie to find them doing something ardently domestic; not just the discomfort of all their other shared history.


	5. Maria

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Idk why they gotta be slightly adversarial but Joel’s Joel, man.
> 
> He’s not telling and she just wants to hear it even though she already knows.

Maria’s head turns sharply, always catching sight or scent of something. Joel compared her to an overly alert hunting dog, just in the context of her keen senses, and Tommy shoved him while biting down on agreement.

Maria stabled her mare, carefully brushing her out and muttering plans, thinking out what to do once she gets to the dam. Her gaze fixes on Joel’s stable where he’s tacking down his horse after patrol, and he glances up without changing his expression, glancing back down like she wouldn’t notice him taking up space if he didn’t make eye contact.

Maria moves curiously, comfortable enough around her brother-in-law to not verbalize all her intentions as she had when he’d first come to Jackson; jumpy and suspicious. Hands on the stable’s gate, Maria pops her head over and a smile spreads across her face. It’s a rare sight except to Tommy, and Joel’s happy his brother met someone who saves sincere mirth for when she means it—no falsehoods, no placation.

“What are those, Joel?” Maria points. It’s the same I-already-know tone Ellie employed when she’d found Molly’s flannel across the back of the couch. _Looks a bit tight for you, Joel. Sure hope nobody’s missing their shirt,_ Joel.

Joel finally sighs and turns to face Maria.

“Nothin’,” he decides to say, realizing it’s a poor choice as he does. His horse shifts, and in his saddlebag, five long stalks of soft purple flowers rustle together, tossing yellow pollen into the light beams slanting through the stables.

He hadn’t strictly mentioned Molly kissing him until he couldn’t remember the year to Maria yet, assuming Tommy would spill soon enough and she’d leave off her persistent matchmaking.

“Uh huh,” she gives with a wry look.

“How did you even—” he starts, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Maria taps hers.

“I have a decent sense of smell? Wildflowers in the stables is pretty unusual?” _Both Millers are unsubtle idiots?_ Maria’s tone seemed to imply.

Joel looks at her blankly.

“Mhmm,” he acknowledges, taciturn even in making the sound.

“So…” Maria nudges. Her patience won most battles—he’d seen her stare down plenty of people until they folded. Joel took a certain amount of pride in his immunity to her persistence, usually leaving Tommy to deal with her displeasure at him.

“So,” Joel unfastens and lifts the saddle off of his horse.

“Oh, come on, _now_ I’m just curious,” Maria backs down first.

“It’s been a couple of weeks, let it alone,” Joel grumbles.

“I’m a little impressed. You’re not exactly _weeks_ of subtlety,” Maria crosses her arms, triumphant. 

“How you planning on hiding those from everyone else?” She continues.

“Wasn’t,” Joel lifts them from the saddlebag, tucking them into his arm without much pressure.

Maria looks offended, but it passes quickly.

“Molly will love them,” she calls as he secures the gate and makes his way towards the main door. Joel’s head snaps into profile with a thunderous look. He pauses and throws up his free hand, shaking his head and walking onto the street, long purple plumes rising past his shoulders contrasting with his absolutely battered backpack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [the flowers are these guys, you can see them when you first get to the Snake River leading into Jackson in TLOU](https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=luar3)


End file.
